The Lifeboat Clique Read Online Free Page A

plan, and I already knew I was going through with it. I felt bad about sneaking around on my mother, but not bad enough to just go to bed and wake up to the same dismal life.
    Sonny Boy watched me impassively. If Sonny Boy were a human, he would be at the cool table in our cafeteria, because he was beautiful and confident and a douche bag. He would have snubbed me in the halls, perhaps making some cruel joke at my expense, and broken the hearts of cheerleaders who couldn’t see beneath his sleek, purring facade.
    Me: What are you looking at, Sonny Boy?
    SB (high voice): A dipshit who has never seen a YouTube makeup tutorial.
    Me: I think I’m getting really nervous because I’m abusing myself while pretending to talk in your voice.
    SB (high voice): Then can I paw at the butterflies in your stomach?
    Finally I was finished. I gazed into the mirror. I looked good. As good as I was going to look. My brown hair, although not a particular flashy color, was looking extra-shiny tonight. I had what were considered delicate features,with a nice jawline and eyebrows that never needed plucking because they were born behaving themselves. And my nose was a perfect size and shape—at least, it had been, until Abigail punched me in the face. Now I imagined one nostril was slightly deformed. Probably all in my head—just part of the trauma of the memory.
    And what made me think I could show up at the party of my greatest enemy and she wouldn’t throw me out? I had no idea. And yet I took the chance. I opened the window and slid out and fell into some bushes, and I was free. It took a few minutes to extricate myself and pull the leaves from my hair and check to make sure the branches hadn’t ripped my shirt. Sonny Boy gazed down from the window at me, his eyes glowing bright in the moonlight. Had he the power to lug his litter box to the window and dump its contents on my freshly blow-dried head, he would have. That is the kind of cat he was.
    I crept over to the garage, opened the door as quietly as I could, and started up my mother’s Subaru. She had given me a spare set of keys so I could drive myself to work.
    I think we’ve already established that I was a terrible person.
    I took Santa Monica Boulevard west to the Pacific Coast Highway. The window in the back of my mother’s Subaru had some kind of electrical short in it, and she wasgoing to fix it but used the money for a Robert Pathway seminar instead; and now the wind whistled through that space and made a moaning, disappointed sound as I drove sneakily up the coast toward Malibu.
    I let down my window so I could feel the ocean breeze. The water itself was flat and calm. I passed Sunset and Topanga and many Realtor offices and seafood restaurants and surf shops before I finally entered Malibu, which was lined on the ocean side by narrow wooden houses right next to one another, where people could walk out in back and stroll down the twenty-two inches of viable sand between high and low tides.
    The night was particularly clear, and the stars were bright overhead. The moon at three-quarters. I had overheard the address of the party house by lurking around the popular girls in the locker room before gym class and then used the internet to track down the location. According to Zillow, the Abigail-blessed party house had lingered empty on the market for the past eleven months at 2.4 million dollars—enough to buy a mile of bait shops in South Carolina but not enough to make a splash in California real estate.
    I was a bit of a real estate freak. Not just because my mother worked in a Realtor’s office but because lonely people need a hobby, and that’s what I picked, along withmy other two hobbies: watching the Discovery Channel and grooving alone to Just Dance 4 on Wii, my movements imitating that of a giraffe floundering in a vat of gelatin.
    Zillow had displayed interiors of the house. The owner had staged it with tacky furnishings and